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The bigger impact isn't luring U.S. scientists to China. It's keeping top Chinese scientists/students in China. Chinese grad students/postdocs are highly repr

The bigger impact isn't luring U.S. scientists to China. It's keeping top Chinese scientists/students in China. Chinese grad students/postdocs are highly represented at elite U.S. universities. With recent political changes in the U.S. making more difficult for international students to come to the U.S. or at least giving the impression that the U.S. is not as friendly to immigration, enrollment from international students have started to drop in the past 2 years. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/13/new-international-student-enrollments-continue-decline-us-universities https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/13/new-internati... https://cgsnet.org/first-time-over-decade-international-graduate-applications-and-enrollments-decline-us-institutions https://cgsnet.org/first-time-over-decade-international-grad...

withhighprod 8y ago
This drop is something CCP leaders dreamed about for years and they didn’t have practical way to do it. And Trump made it
r0m4n0 8y ago
I am employed by one of the big tech companies in the bay and was recently chosen to interview candidates for our new grad program. I was astonished by how many top of class graduate students we brought into the program that had identical backgrounds. Around 90% had studied in and were from China, usually undergrad there and Ivy League grad school with close to perfect GPAs. If they are keeping their students, I haven’t seen it yet. Will see how it plays out in the near future
- ylem 8y ago
  The American Physical Society recently found that international enrollment in graduate physics programs I'd down by around 10%. But, it's uneven. At say Harvard or Stanford, things are probably still fine, but a smaller institutions, it can be much greater. What's worrisome (as an American) is that these trends may not be reversible
  - selimthegrim 8y ago
    What makes you think this is a secular trend, and does it apply to domestic grad students too?
- AbrahamParangi 8y ago
  The presence of Chinese students interviewing for your grad program says nothing about the percentage of equivalent performance students who choose to remain in China.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Surely, it just says that we keep getting a lot of great students from China. The number of returnees has risen, but so has the overall number of non-returnees (the result of a lot more Chinese students studying in the states).
- shalmanese 8y ago
  How many of them will still be at your company in 3 years time though? Chinese companies are realizing that students with a little bit of work experience at Western firms are a lot more valuable than new grads (especially because a lot of new grads nowadays are kids of rich parents who couldn't hack it in the Chinese education system). Smart, ambitious Chinese students are now planning the right new work experiences in the US with an eye towards returning back to China as a junior VP at Tencent or Alibaba when they go back. The way to retain them in the US is to give them the same career opportunities here but a lot of Chinese students are realizing they can climb the ladder a lot faster and further in China and making the rational choice to go back.
- jjcc 8y ago
  I can explain where your astonishing comes form(maybe off topic): there are something to do with how China built the nation yet not quite visible to westerners. There are many factors. One important factor which amplifies other factors is related to big number theory: quantity is translated into quality. Average Chinese are not quite different from other nationals.(Let's put down controversial conclusion for now) . However China has 1.3 billion people. With such a big number , a small shift of the average on the IQ bell curve doesn't matter. What you have met are a vary small portion of top talent from China. As analogy, you can image a typical top NBA athlete would be black. But with 1.3 billion people there exists a Yao Ming who is not a typical Chinese. Then why it happened recently? That's related to last 30 years rapid development.But that's invisible part. China not only build road , bridge, bullet train, etc. more importantly which also matches Chinese traditional value: China invest heavily in Education. In 80's (i.e. my generation ) only 5-10% of high school graduate can be accepted by limited universities at the time. But money poured into Education increased year by year incrementally like crazy. Today there are enough universities to provide any qualified students an opportunity for education. The consequence is there's a big change on human capital. This is not limited to what you observed but also in other areas. For example, China is exporting the infrastructure building expertise all over the world. Quite often the builders have to bring whole teams from China because qualified teams are only available there. Those are experienced skill construction workers but not academically competitive students. The significant increase in human capital is less visible than infrastructure improvement, yet it has a bigger impact
  - Foobar8568 8y ago
    And also the competition to get into good school etc. Basically a student life doesn't start at 18, 16, or 12, but 2years old, if not one and half (interviews for kindergarten). Constant ranking, placement exams, number of school hours etc makes western education pathetic. At the end of P1, Chinese kids are supposed to read something like 800 Chinese words, write 60% of them (if my memory serves me well), in France/Switzerland, most kids can barely read at that age. And poor them if you even think to enforce that. We are destroying generations if the parents don't realize how fucked up is our system: education is a building process, with layers and layers of foundation.

withhighprod 8y ago

This drop is something CCP leaders dreamed about for years and they didn’t have practical way to do it. And Trump made it

r0m4n0 8y ago

I am employed by one of the big tech companies in the bay and was recently chosen to interview candidates for our new grad program. I was astonished by how many top of class graduate students we brought into the program that had identical backgrounds. Around 90% had studied in and were from China, usually undergrad there and Ivy League grad school with close to perfect GPAs. If they are keeping their students, I haven’t seen it yet. Will see how it plays out in the near future

ylem 8y ago
The American Physical Society recently found that international enrollment in graduate physics programs I'd down by around 10%. But, it's uneven. At say Harvard or Stanford, things are probably still fine, but a smaller institutions, it can be much greater. What's worrisome (as an American) is that these trends may not be reversible
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  What makes you think this is a secular trend, and does it apply to domestic grad students too?
AbrahamParangi 8y ago
The presence of Chinese students interviewing for your grad program says nothing about the percentage of equivalent performance students who choose to remain in China.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Surely, it just says that we keep getting a lot of great students from China. The number of returnees has risen, but so has the overall number of non-returnees (the result of a lot more Chinese students studying in the states).
shalmanese 8y ago
How many of them will still be at your company in 3 years time though? Chinese companies are realizing that students with a little bit of work experience at Western firms are a lot more valuable than new grads (especially because a lot of new grads nowadays are kids of rich parents who couldn't hack it in the Chinese education system). Smart, ambitious Chinese students are now planning the right new work experiences in the US with an eye towards returning back to China as a junior VP at Tencent or Alibaba when they go back. The way to retain them in the US is to give them the same career opportunities here but a lot of Chinese students are realizing they can climb the ladder a lot faster and further in China and making the rational choice to go back.
jjcc 8y ago
I can explain where your astonishing comes form(maybe off topic): there are something to do with how China built the nation yet not quite visible to westerners. There are many factors. One important factor which amplifies other factors is related to big number theory: quantity is translated into quality. Average Chinese are not quite different from other nationals.(Let's put down controversial conclusion for now) . However China has 1.3 billion people. With such a big number , a small shift of the average on the IQ bell curve doesn't matter. What you have met are a vary small portion of top talent from China. As analogy, you can image a typical top NBA athlete would be black. But with 1.3 billion people there exists a Yao Ming who is not a typical Chinese. Then why it happened recently? That's related to last 30 years rapid development.But that's invisible part. China not only build road , bridge, bullet train, etc. more importantly which also matches Chinese traditional value: China invest heavily in Education. In 80's (i.e. my generation ) only 5-10% of high school graduate can be accepted by limited universities at the time. But money poured into Education increased year by year incrementally like crazy. Today there are enough universities to provide any qualified students an opportunity for education. The consequence is there's a big change on human capital. This is not limited to what you observed but also in other areas. For example, China is exporting the infrastructure building expertise all over the world. Quite often the builders have to bring whole teams from China because qualified teams are only available there. Those are experienced skill construction workers but not academically competitive students. The significant increase in human capital is less visible than infrastructure improvement, yet it has a bigger impact
- Foobar8568 8y ago
  And also the competition to get into good school etc. Basically a student life doesn't start at 18, 16, or 12, but 2years old, if not one and half (interviews for kindergarten). Constant ranking, placement exams, number of school hours etc makes western education pathetic. At the end of P1, Chinese kids are supposed to read something like 800 Chinese words, write 60% of them (if my memory serves me well), in France/Switzerland, most kids can barely read at that age. And poor them if you even think to enforce that. We are destroying generations if the parents don't realize how fucked up is our system: education is a building process, with layers and layers of foundation.